David Hanson: I want to lay my cards on the table straight away and say that I support the motion and I support the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery). I have been here for nearly 20 years, and in that time I have voted on every available occasion to abolish the House of Lords. If I have not been able to abolish the House of Lords—self-evidently, I have not—I have voted for change in the House of Lords.
I will propose some changes that the Government could deliver, should they so wish, to improve democracy without achieving my ultimate objective of massive reorganisation of the formulation of the House of Lords. It is not tenable in the 21st century to have an  unelected House deciding on policy. It is not tenable to have hereditary peers deciding on policy. It is not tenable to have hereditary peers who are elected by other hereditary peers, with very small mandates—sometimes as few as three votes—deciding on policies that affect the lives of my constituents. At a time when the Government are seeking to reduce the membership of this House from 650 to 600 and to remove completely Euro Members of Parliament, whose powers and responsibilities will be transferred back to this House, it is not tenable for us to allow the House of Lords to continue unchanged.
The recently appointed Lord Speaker, Lord Fowler, is a former Conservative MP whom I remember being a member of the Cabinets of Mrs Thatcher and John Major when I first came here. He has said that there is no way the Lords can defend its current size of 820 peers and that
“we’ve been faffing around on this for some time now. And my fear would be that unless we take the initiative here someone else will”.
Let me suggest some simple initiatives. I will set the bar very low, because the Government’s position appears to be that they cannot make massive change, so they will make no change. A proposal to bring some things back into kilter is something that we in this House should support, and I suggest these three simple changes. First, let us remove from the House of Lords the 92 hereditary peers, 91 of whom, as I said in an intervention on the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart), happen to be men and only one of whom is a woman. Those 92 hereditary peers are elected by as few as three votes.